The industry by and large have moved on to containers, with docker being the entry point and eventually graduating to something larger and more orchestrated like k8s.

You’d generally use a publisher container (I.e. php:latest), and then volume mount your code into it for development, and eventually baking your own image for deployment. Be mindful to not include secrets (API keys, passwords, etc.) and inject them via environment variables.

Hey, you should take a look at how Laradock works. I install it as a submodule when I'm working on PHP applications. Slaps the shit out of Laravel Sail and keeps the core dependencies off my OS.

For development, I just run node on my system. I use a library called Nymph.js (that I developed) that runs on SQLite in development, then either MySQL or Postgres in production. It’s nice because I can sync my dev db with rsync when I need to test on a cloud machine, and db backups are really small and easy to manage (literally just copying a few files).

docker.

get it, use it, learn how to quickly turn up and blast away environments.

I've built an entire ecosystem/toolbox out of containerized tools.

It's reduced my delivery times by 50% and decreased my on-the-job stress by a lot.

I don't have to worry anymore of library version collisions. no more asking "what version node am I on?" or "does rvm/nvm support this version?"

I've also been using it to develop AWS cloud services locally as well. Don't need to deploy and increase costs if I can replicate the services locally. testing has become an absolute breeze.